Pikadon
by didyouknowanon
Summary: Flash. Bang. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Japanese pride after the war and the war-heads was, and is, a difficult concept.


**Pika-Don**

_Flash. Bang._

-**  
**

The first thing that Japan learns about the _Pika-don_ is that it lives up to its name. One moment he is fighting Alfred deep in the tropics, hopping from muddy island to muddy island; the next moment, when he finally sees the damned figure of America in the middle-distance, everything goes white. White. Not grey, or red, or the black of unconsciousness. The abrupt flash that assaults his eyes from the inside is white, and suddenly, Japan is struck blind.

Then, he screams.

Japan has never felt such a pain. There is blast of heat and fire as everything fresh and living and good is burnt away in a wave of nausea and a city is wiped off the map; Japan bleeds, and through the fever heat that scorches him inside out, the pain tells him that the junction between his lower back and his left hip has been ripped away, tendons, skin, muscles and all and that's _wrong_. Wrong, because countries don't bleed and tremble from shock. Especially not Japan. The very idea is absurd, but here he stands, falls, screams again as the edges of his perfect, circular wounds blacken and curl in invisible heat.

_How dare he_, he thinks_,_ followed closely by_ How could he?_

A shadow falls over him. "We warned you," Alfred chokes out, gun shaking in his hand, still pointed at his head. "The Potsdam declaration. We warned you."

Kiku can't hear him. Deaf from the explosion, flesh melted from his legs, twitching and sightless in the damp of a tropic rainstorm, Kiku can't hear anything America says. He _hates_. Hiroshima had been wide blue skies and a slow, cool river, and now it is gone. He hates, but more than that, he _hurts_.

_Leave me alone,_ he tries to yell, not sure whether he still has a voice. _Leave me alone and finish this. I surrender. Just leave me alone, and don't stand there gloating like a coward. Please.  
_

Japan can deal with death. Death is elegant and clean and noble. A warrior's death is one slice from his own blade. Kamikaze is death and destruction weaved together into an art form.

This is not death. This is humiliation to the greatest degree.

Alfred's gun clicks. _Flash. Bang_. Nagasaki burns.

After Fat Man, humiliation does not matter any more.

-

Kiku is a ghost in a surgical robe, cheeks hollow, skin falling off of him in dank sheets. Alfred thinks he might be sick as he approaches. Japan smells like rotting flesh and vomit and his wrists are stick thin because if his people have nothing to eat, then he must bear their burden with them. There is still not enough.

America sits next to him in greeting, unsure of what to say or how to begin.

"I have food." There's no response. He takes a slow breath. "I have a man named MacArthur. We'll rebuild. But your people need you. You need to eat. You need to heal."

He doesn't raise his eyes from his lap. At first America think he hasn't heard him, but then Kiku nods without meeting his gaze. He wets his lips with a blackened tongue, no longer silver, not forked.

"Cranes," he manages to say, croaking out in a small, tired voice. Alfred looks. There is a golden bird made out of folded paper in Kiku's red-raw hands, cradled like an inch-tall child. "There is a girl, in my hospital. She folds…cranes."

Alfred doesn't speak, his words caught in his throat. Kiku continues regardless, weak voice as lifeless as his eyes.

"Cranes live a thousand years, Mr. Alfred. If you fold a thousand of them, you are granted a wish."

"…What is her wish?"

"Many people here wish they were dead." He doesn't even pretend that it's anything close to an answer. A nurse bustles past and says something in English to Alfred, but Kiku doesn't listen. It is something he wouldn't be able to understand, and he is fine with that. He understands very little of anything in his own country anymore, where foreign soldiers and doctors bring him medicines with labels he can't read.

America sends the nurse away. Blinking, he turns back to him and swallows. "You need to take these pills, Kiku. Your white blood cell count is down, and I know that's not good…_please_-"

"That girl," he begins in a broken whisper.

America misunderstands. "We'll look after her, just-"

"-She died today."

The air between them is heavy and still. Something in America seems to wilt. He has bags under his eyes. For the first time since the last bomb, Japan remembers just how young America is. Japan has lived through many crane's lives; America fewer than 300 years.

And yet, here he sits in his mercy.

"You won't _die_." Alfred leans in desperate next to him, appeals to him with his eyes. "_I won't let you_."

-

There is a man in the ward next to Japan who had been delivering milk bottles when it had happened. His hand is a melted, fused mess of glass and bone and flesh become one in the unbelievable heat.

The woman in the bed down the hall looks slightly pregnant. She isn't. Her pancreas has ballooned to five times its normal size and she vomits blood in radiation morning sickness.

It as at this point that Japan realises that he is lucky. Alfred is right. Countries can't die.

Not in a physical sense, at least.

-

No matter how he stares, the photo does not go away. He sits at his writing desk for long minutes. It is the front page of the newspaper where, resplendent in black and white, MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito stand side by side.

His insides roil as he looks. They are standing together. As equals. Not even equals, because MacArthur is a _Gaijin_ and a soldier first and foremost. Kiku wonders how his ruler could look so small and utterly dominated.

Later, Japan sits in on MacArthur's meeting. Sometimes Alfred is there as well, and they sit together and Kiku feels a little more welcome. Other times, like today, he is alone with big foreign men in uniform and the few smaller Japanese who sit before them and the radiation sickness creeps up inside him. When someone asks him his approval he signs using America's blue fountain pen, not entirely sure of what the English says. He doubts the translators really understand the documents either, but MacArthur tells him it is for the good of his people.

So he signs.

One member of the council arrives late, stamping snow from his boots. It's Shirase, dressed in a sharp brown suit; a high ranked progressive. He speaks perfect English, and proceeds to wish them _a very Merry Christmas_.

Christmas. What a novel concept. Kiku considers the word to himself for a moment.

Shirase leaves a small package on the table on top of MacArthur's papers as he sits down. A gift from the Emperor, no less, he mentions nonchalantly as every Japanese in the room takes a common breath in awe.

The American gives a warm smile, then tells a soldier to put it away somewhere.

Japan stiffens. The men on his side of the room fall silent. So this is what has become of them, Kiku thinks in a flash.

"_Excuse_ me?"

Shirase has risen to his feet again, face livid. "Excuse me?" he repeats. "What gives you the right to 'put this gift away'?" He strides over, grabs the gift from the startled man halfway across the room and drops it back to where it had been. "Last time I checked, a gift from a head of state _meant something_, especially when none of us celebrate Christmas."

The man darts his eyes to the country sitting in the shadowed corner of the room. He stares. Then, he narrows his eyes and twitches his mouth and shoots a parting sentence in angry Japanese to the assembled company before he marches out the door.

"We may have lost the war, but I do not remember us becoming slaves to American etiquette."

Japan cringes. For the rest of the meeting he cannot raise his eyes from the floor. The warrior in him demands that he too stand tall and tell this loud American on his soil that the Japanese don't eat bread, that the emperor is meant to be respected, that his people are proud and so is he, _dammit_. But Kiku is getting good at swallowing his arrogance.

He knows America can't help it. MacArthur can't help that he is taller and bigger than the Japanese Emperor, can't help it that the only food they can spare is musty powdered milk and bread rolls. When he calls Japan 'children' he means it as a compliment of their character, not an insult about their powerlessness. He can't help it any more than Alfred can help expressing himself by shaking his hand and patting his back, even though Kiku's skin is still painful scabs and pockmarks.

Japan is only now beginning to understand how the West operates. He prays his people will forgive him for taking so long.

-

Japan is rebuilt, but he is confused as to who he really is in this strange new world of suits and ties and Baby Boom culture. His children listen to American records and chew out English words with varying accuracy. One thing is for sure, though. Japan is stronger than he had been. And he thanks America for that.

As Alfred expands his arsenal of Flashes and Bangs, eyeing off Ivan across the Pacific, he lowers his head and says nothing.

-

"Show me the scars," they say, sixty years after it happened. Kiku has always been uncomfortable about nudity, but progressive about customer service. Instead of slipping off his traditional white silks, he gives them his shrouded smile and a photo of his back, and directs them to the understated memorial sites which stand in monument.

Germany hangs back, and does not take a brochure.

"Do they still hurt?" he asks gruffly. They meet each other's eyes and Kiku knows they look the same, in the same way he knows how to construct cultured conversation and write poetry, although he spends more time drawing comics now. Germany stands before him, a bizarre mix of East and West in his own right, ill at ease in his own clothes, even if he would never admit it.

"Yes," Japan replies softly. "It twinges sometimes." More from guilt than anything else. It is his own fault that he received these scars, and it is Alfred who taught him how to recover. He is ashamed that he brought such pain upon his people, and he will never bring this hell upon himself again.

The two warriors turned businessmen and pacifists stare at each other for a while, as if sizing each other up. They are simultaneously less and more than what they were when they first met. Something is missing, because Kiku still lowers his eyes when in the company of _Haku-jin_, and Germany has lost his _Grossmansucht_.

"He…They mean well." Ludwig bites out the words, looking to the side and blushing. "They want to understand, I think." Japan smiles. Even if the words somehow sound more like a mantra to himself, it is just so like Germany to try to reassure him like this.

"I know."

"Ah."

His eyes wander to the group standing under Sadako's arch, to the hundreds of thousands of paper cranes in glass boxes from all around the world. He swallows the lump in his throat and lets out a breath. "It is funny though. This was…built for me. To remind _me_. It is funny that so many would…"

"Ah." Germany gently clasps a hand on his shoulder, eyes vacant. "As were mine. We never let ourselves forget, do we?"

A pause. "Do they still hurt, _Doitsu-san_?"

They both watch Alfred standing amongst his countrymen, camera around his neck forgotten as he stares up at the bronze figure of a little girl, arms thrown up to support a paper crane.

"…Yes. But not physically."

-

Nobody notices the guest book disappear.

That night, he sets his futon out on the _tatami_ mats and sits on cushioned _zabuton _as the serving girl brings in his meal. A little rice, a little fish, some pickled vegetables and some crunchy fried roots, all in a bowl topped up with green tea. A Hiroshima speciality, one he hasn't eaten in a while. It's good, he tells her, and she bows her head.

Later, he is out on the _engawa_, watching the sun set slowly in the west, when he brings out the book. He flips through it, page by page, reading every last message, eyebrows furrowed in concentration, mouth rounding off English syllables and Mandarin Pinyin. He will decipher the meaning of the words the foreigners and his people leave behind, and learn the lesson that is concealed within this book.

On the last page, however, Kiku's fingers stop on blue ink and familiar handwriting. He reads once, twice, three times.

_I'll never let it happen to anyone again. We won't. I promise. _

He runs his fingers over the English and wordlessly, lost, looks out into the garden. Suddenly, Kiku realises that the moon is out, and that he had been reading in the dark. How foolish of him to forget himself like that. The visitor's book is promptly closed and put away, the sliding paper screens closed against the chill, and he lies down in his futon and stares out at the silhouettes of fireflies dancing outside in the summer air.

America, England, Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, South Africa and North Korea.

Japan thinks about all his friends with their armies and atomic playthings, closes his eyes, and hopes that America can keep its promises.

* * *

**Softly, Softly, Atom bomb **

The man and all his Friends orbit

'Round and 'Round the Axis

That spins the world away from what it's

Meant to be.

-_Flash War_, Flash-Bang- Grab a partner

Spin them up and down and sideways and

Let them go to watch them stagger and

Fall.

The tropics rain amid machine-gun bird-calls.

You'll lose. They'll lose. We'll all lose,

Unless-

Unless some lose more than the rest of you.

So smile, Uncle Sam, and load your gun

With trivialities and small things, and shoot.

David and Goliath. Two bullets and the boy bleeds.

_Pika-Don. Flash-_

_-Bang. Flash-Bang._ Bang.

'I give in.' The boy in white kneels 'fore you.

In the rain his hair is painted ink, and

The sun rises in blotches on his uniform.

The boy who raped Man (churia)

Breaks down, Clockwork unwinding, and-

-He sees the Light.

All you learnt was how to point a gun at a man who neither

In- nor Out-played you.

And you hope, desperately, that

There is peace at least in Wide Islands and Long Harbours and

Two dimensions.

-

Did you know?

_Pika-Don_ is the Japanese onomatopoeia for Flash-Bang. Survivors of the atomic bombs describe the bombs as first a sudden flash, then a bang as the explosion hit; the term is a Japanese colloquialism for the bombs.

Hiroshima's main river, the Oota, is considered to be one of the most beautiful in Japan, and one of the defining features of the city.

Nagasaki, southwest of Hiroshima on the Kyuushuu Island, was Japan's centre of cultural exchange after it opened itself to other nations. As a result, it has the highest proportion of Christians of any city and around 130 churches. Other major foreign influences to land there include Holland, America, England and Germany.

A girl named Sadako Sasaki in Hiroshima, aged two when the bomb hit, began to fold 1000 paper cranes while afflicted by radiation sickness, believing in their power to grant wishes. She unfortunately died from Leukemia after folding only 644. She was buried with 1000 paper cranes, which her friends had completed for her.

Both people mentioned as patients are inspired by real people and their symptoms; these cases are shown in the display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.

The newspaper photo and the fiasco with the Christmas gift are both trufax. The photo apparently sparked muted outrage, simply because MacArthur was so big and foreign and stood _next_ to the Emperor.

Jirou Shirase was a real person. After MacArthur tried to put the present away, he became outraged and tried to take it home with him. MacArthur apologized and accepted the gift with more appreciation.

MacArthur meant well and did well. Understandably, however, Japanese pride after the war was, and still is, a confusing thing.

Visiting Germany's Gedankstatte at Dachau (the first concentration camp) and Sachsenhausen (the biggest in the vicinity of Berlin), I was struck by the similarity in approach that Japan and Germany have in building memorials. They are all understated, quiet, and horribly moving.

Gaijin- foreigner  
Hakujin- "white-man"; anglo-saxon  
Grossmansucht- German for the 'desire to show oneself as a man, or to be a man'.  
zabuton- kneeling cusion  
engawa- sort of a balcony in trad. Japanese houses


End file.
